There was no one in the emptied bedroom except for me. I stared at the almost blank walls and atrocious carpeting, stuck in a grief coma. The front door banged. And everyone arrived, I think all at once, it seemed all at once. They showed up with cold beer, Jameson and ginger ale, chardonnay and ice, plump cookies, gourmet cheeses and butter crackers and someone showed up with a roasted chicken and someone a bag of locally made, cilantro-fragrant fried tacos because grief and mourning make you hungry, famished, actually, and thirsty for a substantial drink at 11:30 a.m. The tiny, petal-precious great-granddaughter made the rounds of arms, watched over by her cousins while we emptied drawers and closets and loaded cars with my dad’s final cherishables and prepared the haul-aways to be hauled away as we drank and ate and laughed and sniffed, the barely-autumn light reaching us in fractures and sparkles through windows whose shades we removed and one of us had to duck anytime he neared the whirling ceiling fan. By four o’ clock we were exhausted and just then the ashes arrived, but not the urn, because mix-ups happen even with mortuary companies, apparently–despite the delicately crucial subject matter. We placed our dad’s unceremoniously (if not anti-climatically) boxed ashes in a shopping bag and trekked out of his condo and across the street to the hundred steps leading down to the beach, two of us carrying surfboards, some of us balancing body boards on our heads and one of us carrying my dad. We found our spot and set my dad on a striped beach towel with a perfect view of his family as we raced into the Pacific and swam and splashed and screamed and surfed off all of the day except memories–we rode those well into the night, my boxed father passed from lap to lap as stories were shared and discoveries acknowledged and children crashed on hoodies. Stay, stay–the night carried on and each time someone spoke, a touch of panic/touch of magic, a dully (though as if specifically) beating moon with a fringe of sea mist our constant watcher, sole-eye, power-face, bug-riddled lamp and, this night, old whisper, old friend.